The present invention relates to a booklet having a spine constituted by serial pasting of like marginal regions of the booklet pages, and in which an initially sufficiently securely held return envelope is easily detachable from the spine.
Quite frequently income tax form booklets and other business forms are constituted by a series of pages arranged in a stack, with the pages serially bound to one another in a spine by bands of adhesive which extend along like marginal regions of all but the first or last of the pages. In such booklets, it is common to provide for the individual detachment of one or more (but less than all) of the booklet pages from the spine, e.g. by providing a line of weakness (e.g. a line of perforations) running along each respective page parallel to and closely adjacent to the pasted spine.
Accordingly, each page which is separated from the booklet by severing it from the spine along the respective line of weakness is shorter than the booklet in the direction normal to the length of the spine, by an amount equal to the width of the spine.
It is very convenient for such a booklet to be accompanied by a return envelope, i.e. one which the booklet recipient can use for returning to the booklet sender one or more of the pages which the recipient has detached along the respective line or lines of weakness, often after the recipient, following instructions provided in the booklet, has entered information on one or more of those pages and attached other sheets it to (e.g. annual income payment statements, and a tax balance payment check).
Many ways have been devised for temporarily uniting a return envelope with such a booklet. One way known in the art is to bind the return envelope into the spine of the booklet just as if it were another sheet of the booklet, and to provide for detachment of the envelope from the spine by providing it with a line of weakness running along the inner edge of the spine, so that it may be detached in the same way that pages may be removed from the booklet, as described above.
Presently, many booklets such as tax form booklets sent to individuals have some pages that are printed with subject matter that is common to all of the similar booklets that the sender is sending to many individuals in a particular mass mailing, and other pages which contain at least some customised printed information (and possibly, even usually, some common printed information). Such booklets and a way of printing them are disclosed in the U.S. Pat. No. 3,911,818, of MacIlvaine issued Oct.14, 1975.
In the high speed production of pasted spine-type booklets having some removable pages and a detachable return envelope, particularly when the booklets contain a mixture of fixed and variable data, and particularly where the booklet manufacturing method is carried out by pasting and assembling corresponding portions of a plurality of webs of indeterminate length, then severing the assembled composite transversally of its direction of travel, into a succession of individual booklets, there is a disadvantage to trying to assemble preformed individual return envelopes to the composite web or to the individual booklets, and a corresponding advantage to forming the return envelopes from a pasted and plow-folded intermediate continuous web simultaneously with pasting and assembly of the page webs to form the series of booklets.
However, it should be apparent that in instances in which the return envelopes made in such a way are pasted into the booklet spines and made detachable along lines parallel to the spines, the interior widths of the envelopes will be smaller than the widths of the detached pages meant to be returned in them (unless the page spine stubs are made broader than the return envelope spine stubs, which can be awkward and wasteful of material). In such cases, the detached pages must be folded not only in a J, V, C or Z fold in one direction, but also at least J-folded along an axis normal to that of the first folds before they can be inserted in the return envelope by the booklet recipient.